You know the scenario: A great apocalyptic quake rocks Los Angles and San Francisco, a huge rift opens somewhere near the Nevada state line and the screams of 30 million Californians are silenced forever under the roiling waves of the Pacific. Nevadans sincerely mourn the loss of the Golden State – for several minutes – and then make billion selling beach-front properties.

It’s sort of an appalling, appealing, high-energy cataclysm with a neat and tidy aftermath. But it’s annoying hearing it spoken of over and over – with absolute credulity – by some Easterners each time we have a respectable temblor: "Hey, you guys fall into the ocean yet? Har, har, har!"

The geological truth is that California is not going down all that easily and Nevada, in all likelihood, will remain a landlocked desert for at least several million years more.

I don’t know where the "falling into the Pacific" story started, but it apparently gained quite a following after it was used in the plot of a Superman movie a few years back. In that flick a villain threatened to sink California with a carefully placed nuclear blast. It’s not an original idea, since rumor has it the folks at the Nevada Test Site have been trying to do the same thing for decades.

Over the years I have been surprised to learn that there are a large number of grown-up, educated people who honestly believe California is a wedge of land sticking out into the ocean with no foundation beneath it.

The idea seems especially appealing to New Yorkers in the dead of winter. I’ve also noticed that folks’ gullibility for this myth increases in direct proportion to the severity of the winters in their Eastern or Mid-Western state and the number of close relatives they’ve watched move to California. Perhaps the great Sinking California myth gets folks through those dull winter nights in front of the tube watching "Baywatch" (perhaps an even greater California myth).

The truth, as geologists understand it, is that California is indeed on the brink, but not the brink catastrophists believe. The portion of California west of the San Andreas Fault is on a different crystal plate than the rest of the 48 contiguous United States. The San Andreas is the place where the Pacific and North American plates grind together in California. It roughly runs from Salton Sea, near the Mexican Border, up through Point Reyes, north of San Francisco.

Central and southern coastal California may, indeed, fall into the sea, but it will probably get there gradually – over the next 60 million or so years – by sliding northwest and becoming an island off the coast of Oregon.

Way over at the other end of the Quake Myth spectrum are the native Californians, like me. We swaggeringly claim to butter our morning toast with earthquake pre-shocks, slug down main-shocks for lunch and snack on aftershocks through the evening. We even swap quake survival stories like athletes showing off sports injuries.

My first and only big quake was the 6.4 magnitude San Fernando quake of 1971. I was only about eight-years-old. Though we lived 50 miles from the epicenter, my parents, my older siblings and I were all awakened and standing in the hallway, scared. Only my younger sister, Laureen, lived up to the quake veteran myth – she slept through it.

Although the San Fernando quake was about the same magnitude as our recent 6.3 magnitude Nevada temblor and neither shock launched the state into the ocean, there was one major difference: 64 people were killed in the San Fernando quake. In the pre-dawn shock two weeks ago, as I stood shivering in my underwear, braced in a doorway for protection, the only casualty was my quake veteran bravado.

(Accompanying graphics by the author to be added later)

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